Street dance promises a good, low-impact cardiovasular workout and a chance to
look cool. How hard could it be? Ed Cumming went to find out

First impressions can be misleading. For instance I’ve never been to the foyer of hell, but I imagine that if you wanted to give someone an idea you could do worse than direct them to the entrance hall to Pineapple Dance Studios, in Covent Garden.

Up and down a tiny maze of corridors, none of them wider than two people, swarm what feels like thousands of small, lithe, dancey folk. Half are sodden with sweat, limping from practice studios. The other half are limbering up, shifting from foot to foot like Rafael Nadal, waiting for their own turn to sweat. The temperature is about 50 degrees, and the humidity about 90. The smell is otherworldly, perspiration mixed with ambition. Anyone who saw Sky One’s recent documentary about the place, and consequently goes expecting a spotless health centre populated by gay men as highly-strung as its director, Louis Spence, is bound to leave disappointed. On the surface at least, it is truly unpleasant.

I was there to see how 'Hip Hop Street Dance’, one of its most popular courses, might improve my fitness. Having seen the rather average moves on display up and down modern British nightclubs, I wasn’t too worried. All that bopping and strutting and sliding to rap music: how hard could it be? It wasn’t as if I was taking up kickboxing or the triathlon.

“It’s a good cardiovascular workout,” my instructor, the opaquely-titled Lil-J had said as I booked my beginners class. “It’s great for the legs, and it’s also good for the upper arms because street dance uses a lot of arm work. It’s also low-impact – a few people develop knee or ankle problems after a long time because of the stress on them, or in their shoulders from all the body-popping, but not many people get hurt.” This didn’t sound too bad to me, and I was further enthused by her report that “to be honest, I’d say that you’d need to do it at least three times a week to see any improvement in fitness”.

Only too late did I realise that everyone in the changing room, young and old, had a six pack. Whereas I, quite obviously, do not. Ready, and now suitably terrified, I went back upstairs to the studio for the class. I was three minutes late, but rather than neatly skipping the warm-up, as I had hoped, it instead appeared that I had in fact missed nine years of professional dance training, or so it seemed from the way that 40 people were flexing and diving in front of me.

Lil-J turned out to be a tiny, moderately deranged Australian woman with red hair and pink boots, popping and bending at the front. It was difficult to see her. Taking my place in the centre of the four-mirrored room, I tried instead to copy those in front of me, as they looked as though they knew exactly what they were doing. They looked, frankly, dead cool. Like all the best street-dance – from Michael Jackson videos to Diversity, the street dance group that beat Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent, every move looked at once completely casual and laser-precise. This wasn’t going to be easy.

It wasn’t. The first part of the routine involved sticking my hands in the hair, pivoting, sweeping these hands over my head, skipping onto my right foot, turning my head, spinning around and then ducking my head into my fist, 80s music video-style… and then doing the same in the other direction. If this sounds silly and hard to follow, imagine my pain. Like any man trying a sport for the first time, I had imagined that mine would be a talent rarely seen in the field, and that I would, within the hour, be performing to a crowd of cheering onlookers, infatuated exchange students and professional scouts.

What in fact happened was that I looked like the drunk, simple brother of Winnie-the-Pooh during the minute or so after he’d disturbed a hive of anxious bees. By the time Lil-J permitted us a break, just long enough to “grab a quick drink” and book an ambulance, I was already drenched in sweat and panting. Others in the class, mostly elegant young girls, stared at me agog.

“That’s great”, said Lil J. “Now everyone come back, we’re one quarter of the way there!”

The rest of the hour is a blur, at the end of which I emerged aching, out of breath and with sweat Niagara-ing off my brow. The only event that stood out was when, during a particularly energetic spin, my glasses flung off my head onto the floor and the lens popped out. Nothing I’ve read suggests that this is a problem recently to have afflicted Justin Timberlake. I heard at least one unkind chuckle from the back.

Yet after escaping into the cool air (and rarely has a midsummer rainshower been more welcome) my legs, arms and torso all had the throbbing tiredness of muscles rarely used, and the rest of me was filled with a warm metabolic glow. I’d been sweating for an hour, solidly, and though it was initially a shock, once I got going the variety of the activity, the thumping music (it had a much hipper soundtrack than my iPod) and the sense of camaraderie meant the time zoomed past.

I was no nearer to being able to dance than I’d been when I went in, but I was happy and exhausted, and I left with Lil-J’s reassurances ringing in my ears. “You did great! And remember, we teach the same routine all week, so you can come back and practice.”